Zeroville Quotes

“Isn't it weird when that happens?' says Zazi. 'It's like the first time I heard the second Pete Ubu album and thought it just blew completely, I thought anyone who liked it must be stupid and full of shit--and then for about a year it was practically the only album I listened to. It was the only album that made any sense at all. So why does that happen? The music hasn't changed. The movie hasn't changed. It's still the same exact movie, but it's like it sets something in motion, some understanding you didn't know you could understand, it's like a virus that had to get inside you and take hold and maybe you shrug it off--but when you don't it kills you in a way, not necessarily in a bad way because maybe it kills something that's been holding you back because when you hear a really great record or see a really great movie, you feel alive in a way you didn't before, everything looks different, like what they say when you're in love or something--though I wouldn't know--but everything is new and it gets into your dreams.”
― Steve Erickson, Zeroville

“That’s editing, if I may say so. Choosing the shot. It’s telling us everything. It’s telling us things we don’t even know it’s telling us. It’s not just telling us what these characters think, it’s telling us what we think. It’s manipulative as hell, there’s no getting around it, but then all movies are manipulative. When people complain about a picture that’s ‘manipulative,’ what they really mean is it’s not very good at its manipulations, its manipulation is too obvious.”
― Steve Erickson, Zeroville

“Someone dies when the movies get into your dreams.”
― Steve Erickson, Zeroville

“The Movies have always been here. The Movies were here before God. Time is round like a reel of film. God hates the Movies because the Movies are the evidence of what He's done.”
― Steve Erickson, Zeroville

“But of course the Western changed along with America’s view of itself, from some sort of heroic country, where everybody’s free, to the spiritually fucked-up defiled place it really is, and now you got jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America’s just too fucking confused, can’t figure out whether to embrace the myth or the anti-myth, so in a country where folks always figured you can escape your past, now the word is out that this is the country where you can do no such thing, this is the one place where, like the jive that finally becomes impossible to distinguish from the anti-jive, honor becomes impossible to distinguish from betrayal or just, you know, stone cold murder...”
― Steve Erickson, Zeroville

“The pornographer? He is concerned with what the characters do, while the artist, the artist is concerned with who the characters are.”
― Steve Erickson, Zeroville